WHAT IS NLP (NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING)?
NLP began as a model of interpersonal communication. It came about by researching the patterns of excellence used by the world's most successful people. From this research, a model was developed based on the patterns that all of these experts had in common. This training is based on the study of language, communication and personal change. It teachs you to observe, make inferences, and respond to others, just like the world’s most successful people.
NLP addresses the subject of how to use your language to “run your brain”. Your words describe how you perceive the world. As you change your words, your perception of the world changes and you respond to people and situations differently. These new communication skills assist you in adopting, changing, or even eliminating behaviors. It assists you in making new positive choices that allow you to accomplish what you want in your life.
NLP was co-created by Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder in the 1970s. Initially, with the guidance of anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson, the founders modeled three psychotherapists, Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy), Virginia Satir (Family Systems Therapy), and eventually Milton Erickson (Clinical Hypnosis). The goal was to discover what made these psychotherapists more successful than their peers. A model was developed based on training people to observe, make inferences, and respond to others, which is why these psychotherapists were so effective with their patients. Bandler and Grinder believed that human communication experts all have patterns in common that could be learned by others.
The first model was Fritz Perls. Perls was a German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt therapy promotes an awareness between the self and the environment. The second model was Virginia Satir. Satir was known for her approach to family therapy that treats groups (and also individuals) as systems that exhibit homeostasis. Her therapeutic interventions focused mainly on relationship patterns rather than on analyzing the unconscious mind or early childhood trauma of individuals.
After analyzing the patterns of both Perls and Satir, in 1975, Bandler and Grinder published the meta model in the Structure of Magic Volumes I & II. The meta model is a set of specific questions that both Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir used intuitively to respond to deletions, distortions, and generalizations in their clients' language.
Gregory Bateson was so impressed by Bandler and Grinder's model of Perls and Satir, that he agreed to introduce them to Milton Erickson (who would become the third model for NLP). Based on Milton Erickson’s (an American psychiatrist and founding member of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis) unconventional approach to therapy, the Milton model was developed. Erickson was well known for his his ability to "utilize" anything about a patient to help them change. Erickson would include the patient’s beliefs, cultural background, key words, personal history, and even any unusual neurotic habits that they might have. The Milton model incorporates these and other Ericksonion techniques, including verbal patterns such as ambiguity, embedded suggestion, and metaphor, as well as non-verbal patterns, such as matching and mirroring, to effect change with patients.
Bandler and Grinder also found that there are a number of traits common to expert communicators no matter what their field. No matter if they are executives, salespeople, or therapists, all expert communicators all seemed to share the following:
- They were pro-active (not reactive), and had well-formed outcomes rather than formalized fixed beliefs
- They were extremely flexible in their methods, trying different approaches, instead of being fixed in one way of thinking, until they learned enough about the structure of the problem to be able to change it
- At any given time, they were aware of the non-verbal feedback (unconscious communication) and they responded to it
- They enjoyed the challenges of “resistive” clients because it gave them the opportunity to learn
- They respected the client for doing the best they could with the resources that they had available to them
Bandler and Grinder summarized their findings as follows
"… you need only three things to be an absolutely exquisite communicator. We have found that there are three major patterns in the behavior of every therapeutic wizard we've talked to and executives, and salespeople. The first one is to know what outcome you want. The second is that you need flexibility in your behavior. You need to be able to generate lots and lots of different behaviors to find out what responses you get. The third is you need to have enough sensory experience to notice when you get the responses that you want …"